The most famous fictional character ever to be associated to the profession of detectives.
He is also my personal favourite fictional character.
"Sherlock Holmes is perhaps the best-known of all fictional characters.
From the first appearance of the short stories in the Strand Magazine chronicling his extraordinary deductive powers, Holmes became a larger-than-life figure whose devotees were stricken when it seemed that the great detective had perished at the Reichenbach Falls in The Adventure of the Final Problem. Young men put mourning crepe in their hats, and the author was forced by public demand to resurrect his hero.
From that day, a literary cult was born and continues unabated to this day. Perhaps,it is best exemplified by The Baker Street Irregulars, who exist to perpetuate the memory,methods and iconography of the great detective. Its members comprise diplomats, judges, academics as well as ordinary readers who enjoy the romance and atmosphere of Conan Doyle's creation.
Sherlock Holmes's methods may be traced back to one of Doyles's teachers at the Edinburgh Infirmary. Joseph Bell used to enliven his lectures by encouraging his students to recognise a patient as a left-handed cobbler or as a retired sergeant of a Highland regiment who had served in Barbados, by the simple processes of accurate observation and rational deduction.
This inclined Doyle to attribute these qualities to a detective, and to cast that detective as a hero, which was unusual, if not unique, in English stories of the time. The first appearance of Sherlock Holmes was in 1887, in A Study in Scarlet, which was presented as 'a reprint from the reminiscences of John H. Watson, late of the Army Medical Department', and so the happy pairing of the deductive Holmes, with the down-to-earth Dr Watson as foil, was established. The Sign of Four followed in1890, but Holmes did not really catch the public imagination until the first of the short stories, A Scandal in Bohemia, was published in the July issue of The Strand Magazine in 1891. These stories were illustrated by the remarkable Sidney Paget, who used his brother Walter as model for 'the tall, spare figure of Holmes', standing before the Baker Street fireplace, looking down on Watson in his 'singular, introspective fashion'. It was Paget who equipped Holmes with his famous deerstalker hat, though he never gave him the meerschaum pipe which became an icon following a stage production of one of the stories in the 1920's.
As well as being fast-paced detective stories, the Sherlock Holmes adventures provide a fascinating glimpse into 1890's London. The domestic arrangements at 221B Baker Street are the focal point of the metropolitan civilization that encompasses November fog and hansom cabs, frock coats, silk hats and hurried railway journeys on trains that run on time, scandal in high places and murder in low ones.
From textual evidence, Sir Sidney Roberts concluded that Sherlock Holmes was born in 1854 of an English father and a mother descended from a line of French painters. He seems to have been something of an aesthete at university, probably at Oxford, but certainly not Cambridge.
On coming down from university he took rooms near the British Museum to study those sciences relevent to his subsequent career. In 1881, in a laboratory at St Bartholomew's Hospital, he met Dr Watson, and they decided to share the rooms in Baker Street. We know that Holmes refused a knighthood, but he did accept the Legion d'Honneur. He retired to Sussex,kept bees, but of his life after 1914, there exists no record."
Passage extracted from "The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes"
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SHERLOCK HOLMES MUSEUM